Related papers: Entropic Risk Constrained Soft-Robust Policy Optim…
This paper studies a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based actor critic (AC) reinforcement learning (RL) technique to control a linear discrete-time system with a quadratic control cost while ensuring a constraint on the…
Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…
Uncertainty is prevalent in engineering design, data-driven problems, and decision making broadly. Due to inherent risk-averseness and ambiguity about assumptions, it is common to address uncertainty by formulating and solving conservative…
In this paper we present a framework for risk-averse model predictive control (MPC) of linear systems affected by multiplicative uncertainty. Our key innovation is to consider time-consistent, dynamic risk metrics as objective functions to…
We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
We introduce a simple but effective method for managing risk in model-based reinforcement learning with trajectory sampling that involves probabilistic safety constraints and balancing of optimism in the face of epistemic uncertainty and…
Optimization of conditional convex risk measure is a central theme in dynamic portfolio selection theory, which has not yet systematically studied in the previous literature perhaps since conditional convex risk measures are neither random…
This effort is focused on examining the behavior of reinforcement learning systems in personalization environments and detailing the differences in policy entropy associated with the type of learning algorithm utilized. We demonstrate that…
This paper considers risk-sensitive model predictive control for stochastic systems with a decision-dependent distribution. This class of systems is commonly found in human-robot interaction scenarios. We derive computationally tractable…
We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…
Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…
In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…
Reinforcement Learning is a powerful framework for training agents to navigate different situations, but it is susceptible to changes in environmental dynamics. However, solving Markov Decision Processes that are robust to changes is…
We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However,…
Simplicity is a critical inductive bias for designing data-driven controllers, especially when robustness is important. Despite the impressive results of deep reinforcement learning in complex control tasks, it is prone to capturing…
Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
We introduce Implicit Policy, a general class of expressive policies that can flexibly represent complex action distributions in reinforcement learning, with efficient algorithms to compute entropy regularized policy gradients. We…
This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, We identify a new connection between policy gradient and dynamic programming in MMDPs and propose the Coordinate Ascent Dynamic Programming (CADP) algorithm to compute a Markov policy…